American troops in landing craft go ashore on one of four beaches in Normandy, France on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

For the great event of yesterday there is no precedent in history. Never has so vast a world held its breath in eager suspense waiting for news of the landing of an army. Four years ago a small British force took ship from the Dunkirk beaches, leaving behind it a memory like the ghost-like memory that haunts Corunna, but taking with it, like Sir John Moore's army, the spirit that was to sustain the courage of Europe. Hitler seemed to have Europe at his mercy, and his mercy was that of the ancestors of the Nazis, described by Bridges in Testament of Beauty:

Ruthless invaders, live firebrands, that spreadThe blast of their contagion to Allemand and Frank,Burgundian, Vandal, and Lombard, from Angles and DaneTo furthest Kelt.

These firebrands were lighting up red skies in one country after another, like a lamplighter touching into flame a row of gas-jets in a street. The peoples of Europe looked this way and that in dread as the danger turned and shifted. Hitler, who had been so skilful in deceiving Europe, believed he could consume in these flames the universal spirit of man. He has learnt that he was wrong. He has tortured millions of men and women in his concentration camps, in his German treadmills, in their homes, where every tie of blood or friendship or common danger is turned into an instrument of devilish cruelty. But what has he made of the spirit of Europe? Binyon has described the man who seeks to break the human spirit by such methods:

You shape by stroke on strokeMan mightier than he knew;And the fire your hammer wokeIs a life that is best to you.

The Frenchmen to whom General de Gaulle, their great leader, has given the orders of their Government in simple eloquence are an army that has learned in the school of suffering to face greater terrors than those of war. There is not a country in Europe, except Germany, in which the mass of common people do not long for the victory of the Allies. No statesman has so united her peoples as this barbarous man untutored by the warnings that Greek poets and Christian teachers gave to savage power. If Europe looks to the soldiers of the West in hope and gratitude, the West looks to the spontaneous armies of Europe with sympathy and admiration.